I’ve been analising footage for half a year to understand why does the Mclaren front wheels get an heat haze or something similar especially at high speeds, could it be exhaust related or brake related I dont know.
Red Bull as we know used exhaust blowing to their tyres to warm them up before starts, thus explaining why they had a failure at Abu Dhabi, but Mclaren never gave an hint of using hot blowing gases to warm the tyres, not surprised about it Mclaren tend to be very secretive.
So my question is obviously.
Why did the Mclarens presented heat haze on the front tyres in this season?

I actually didn’t think about it as heat haze but as “vortex” coming from the front wing. Like if they wanted to channel their air through that point.

I have also noticed something on the RB7 that hasn’t been mentioned which could be a big factor on their performance and I want to write about it to McLaren but haven’t found a mail adress to them. Does anybody have an adress?

Doubt it is anything dodgy, but it could just be a brake cooling issue (the brakes do work at 1000 degrees, plenty warm enough to create a heat haze). McLaren run with gauze over their brake ducts which does hamper cooling, but it prevents debris getting into the brake ducts. Could explain it.

@UKFanatic It’s not a heat haze. It’s the sidewall actually warping. I’ve talked about this to old engineering colleagues who are still engineers along the paddock; and none of us have the faintest clue of what is going on. It actually does happen on all cars if you look at their on boards; not just the McLaren. But the weirder thing is that it doesn’t happen on the primes. This effect was most seen at top speeds.

The best explanation that either of us could come up with was that it was an effect of the lettering and in the camera rather than the tyre warping in a standing wave through the circumference.

@dam00r Not the McLaren tyre thing – which as I said above isn’t a vortex. It’s not an aero thing, that’s for sure – whatever is happening is either in the tyre or in the camera. But I was talking about your RB7 finding.

You can see that what RB7 has is a softer bridge and it gets narrower there in the middle/end of the nose. This surely must channel the air better around high speed corners than McLarens hard edged and straight side nose bridge. I absolutely think that I’m onto something here

@dam00r Sorry, bridge? Do you mean basically the part that connects the cockpit to the nose? The part where the drivers’ feet are?

If that’s what you’re talking about, and the “shoulder” of the nose having a “squarer” profile on the McLaren then no, that wouldn’t “channel” the air better in any way. There is a much bigger difference in that the McLaren has a flattop nose and the RBR has nose ridges. McLaren is the most professional, the most clinical, hard-engineering driven team you will find in the paddock. They are not one of the teams that I have had the privilege of working for in the past, but I am 100% certain they would have tested details as obvious as that.

@dam00r Are you saying that you caught something that 646 professionally trained engineers, most with at least a masters, and a big portion of which have PhDs, missed something you found?

The McLaren, and Red Bull, are just about the two most different cars on the grid in terms of aerodynamic concepts, as very much evidenced in their cars. U-pods vs shrink-wrapped side pods, under-nose vanes vs snowplough. Even the way that the Red Bull has employed extraction augmenters for their diffuser is quite different to the McLaren.

You’ll find that it’s not a single part, or even a collection of parts where the Red Bull is stronger than the McLaren. The car in itself is just a bit better in every inch of it, rather than being better somewhere.

The squarer shoulders, if anything, mean a bit more drag. It would have negligible effect on cornering

@raymondu999 Actually I’ve noticed that more on the prime tyres and only on Mclaren, especially over 150 mph ndicating possibly like youve said tyre warping still I cant believe that it must be something about heat and wind specific of the MP4-26. I’ll upload some screenshots to really show what I mean.

It may be from the camera angle but the Mclaren not only made the Pirelli letters abit distorted but the whole tyre. I think its better to wait till the next season to understand if it the Pirelli are really that fragile.